The Ricoh Printing Experience

So I showed up to my favorite coworking space in Bangkok once again, ready to engage in productive work, building cool software. But before getting into productive work, I had to tend to my duties as the Managing Director of a German company. Specifically, I had to print documents, sign them with a pen, and then scan them again, before sending them to someone else in Germany via email. This is the German Secure Way of "electronically" signing documents, and it's already considered the "modern" implementation as the alternative would consist of sending them via snail mail.

But how would I print stuff in this fancy coworking space?

Easy: The Ricoh Printing Experience.

You see, when walking through the coworking space, you can observe various large enterprise companies which have set up shop and built fancy offices with lots of glass, which enable you to peer inside, where usually no human can be seen. Which adds one data point that this whole setup was some mediocre idea from a random enterprise marketing dude who had some budget left over.

But one of this offices is the Ricoh Printing Experience, some sort of office which should convey the marketing message that Ricoh is an innovative company making innovative printers. Fittingly, they indeed have set up a few printers in this office, presumably from Ricoh. It's of course a bit unclear which part of setting up clunky laser printers can be considered innovative, but that's probably not a question which was asked during this process.

Now, how to print. Inside of the coworking space, you'll find a few Ricoh printers scattered throughout the area. Attached to each of them is a "manual" on how to print which closely resembles the inscriptions found on the Egyptian pyramids.

I managed to decipher just enough of this "manual". The steps are:

1. Go to a URL and create a Ricoh account.
2. Receive an email which confirms your account creation and also echoes back your chosen password in clear text (!!!).
3. Verify your email by clicking on a link which points to a website at port 9092. It doesn't work. Removing the port and pointing it to 443 works. Hm.

You've managed to create your account. Good job so far. Next, you need to top it up:

1. Scan a hard-coded, paper (!) QR code attached to the printer which points to a generic bank account. Note that none of this contains your Ricoh account information.
2. Transfer a top-up sum of your choosing to this bank account.
3. Take a screenshot of the transfer (!) and send it to the Ricoh Printing Experience LINE account (a type of messenger) where a human will review it (!!) and manually top up your account (!!!). This is possible because you also have to send your username to the LINE account.

I couldn't believe any of this would work. But I was intrigued, and I had to print. So I sent €2.50 to the mysterious bank account and forwarded the screenshot to the even-more-mysterious LINE account. I also added my Ricoh username.

And then I waited.

Only a few seconds later, the message status flipped to "Read". A human had seen my top-up messages! Wow. I was imagining how some random human in some random back-office callcenter processing my LINE top-up message for the Ricoh Printing Experience. This already seemed incredible to me. Or maybe it was an LLM, as nowadays LLMs probably easily pass the "Ricoh Top-Up Turing Test".

The friendly Ricoh human / AI thanked me profusely, confirmed the top-up, and sent me all sorts of friendly stickers (like GIFs) wishing me good luck with my printing endeavor (which turned out to be sorely needed).

This was probably the first time I thought all of this is unbelievable and I might be dreaming.

Next up, you download the Ricoh Printing Experience software for macOS so that your computer can actually connect to the printers. The software is "licensed by Papercut" and, in my opinion, more closely resembles ransomware than actual printing software. You could probably rename it to the "Ransomware Printing Experience". It's a .pkg macOS installer which requests permissions for pretty much everything. Shady.

But as a good German Managing Director, I have to set my personal preferences about ransomware aside and move forward with the task at hand, which consists of printing documents. I hit "Continue".

The installation succeeded, but no printers appeared. What now?

After starting to debug the ransomware by inspecting log files, I concluded that it shouldn't be my job to debug other people's software and went to the front desk of the coworking space. They shrugged but were very helpful in walking down the hallway to the Ricoh Printing Experience enterprise glass office (!) to fetch one of those people to help me out.

The friendly Ricoh employee, a lady, offered to walk with me to the printer to take a look. During our walk, she turned to me and said "Oliver, right?".

How did she know my name?

Then it dawned on me.

She was the human monitoring the top-ups in the LINE account!

I almost burst out laughing.

I just don't know where to start. First you have an enterprise (Ricoh) setting up a fancy glass office for no useful purpose at all, then introducing a completely-ridiculous procedure for topping up accounts, then staffing the office with an actual human whose job is to monitor a messaging channel for account top-ups and credit them manually. How exactly could any of these decisions been a good idea?

And I had so many questions: What does she do all day long? Does she just sit in the Ricoh Printing Experience office and wait for LINE messages of top-ups? What happens if someone wants to top up at night - is there a "night shift" for top-ups? What do all the other employees in the Ricoh Printing Experience office do? Was I the first person to actually do this setup as the software was so obviously broken and no one had noticed before? Etc., etc.

One of those days.

Oh yeah.. we didn't get the printing to work and I just emailed her the documents (to her Ricoh Printing Experience email address). She then printed them not in the coworking space, but in the office of the Ricoh Printing Experience. So all those printers in that office actually work. Interesting..